Where Linux and standards meet patents and Internets.

Less than an hour ago, I had a short email conversation with Daisuke Wakabayashi using his nytimes.com email address, in follow-up to his recent tweet about James Damore’s supposed Twitter account (see below for the details on the James Damore account itself).

When asked about how he confirmed that this is indeed James Damore’s account, Daisuke responded with saying “He told me in an email.” and “I’m not going to get into the specifics, but it’s an email address that I know to be his.”

I don’t have any other source at the moment to corroborate this. I know Newsweek has attempted to contact James Damore as well and at the time of writing this, they say “Newsweek has reached out to Damore for a comment on the account but not yet received a response”, so at the moment they are deferring to the Daisuke’s judgment.

I will leave my original content below as-is for now, as I think there are some potentially important points in there. You can judge for yourself if the account is real or not.

If it is indeed a real account, I’m at least a tiny bit disappointed at the specific approach he is taking on that Twitter account, as it has the potential to antagonize his former colleagues at Google for no clear reason, which is not what I would have expected, and which I don’t think will help the situation. At the moment, I don’t consider the content objectionable per se if it was just about some random person out there, but as with everything else in this story, I fear things will be taken out of context and / or add to the polarization and further prevent a useful discussion.

I’m not blaming James for the storm overall. Quite the opposite! As far as we know, he was trying to have an internal discussion, and someone else at Google leaked it, which is not cool. What I am saying is that in this particular instance, I feel he may be hurting the chances for a conversation to some degree.

That said, at least there is some kind of conversation now.

There’s no clear end to all of this yet, and I’d be happy to be proven wrong regarding some of my speculation here.

Again, you can judge for yourself as for the content on that account, and whether it’s authentic or not.

If I hear about any definite information about the account being fake, I will of course update this post.

Well, let’s see what happens next…

UPDATE 2017-08-11 11:02 UTC: note that if the Twitter account is fake, then so is the LinkedIn account (I’m not going to link to it for the reason listed below), as it points to the Twitter account.

The Google memo story is starting to become more and more disturbing…

Now it looks to me that people are trying really hard to destroy the reputation of James Damore, by means of impersonation. If this is true, this is really perverse.

And just wait until the media reports on this… They have another chance to do their jobs, but I’m not holding my breath.

At the very least – be very, very skeptical of any account or statement that is claimed to be made by James Damore. See screenshots below.

I won’t go much into the background here, please see my previous posts for more details:

At the time of writing this, the “fired4truth” account on Twitter ( @fired4truth ) now has 25000 followers. I’m not linking to it here, in the hopes that it doesn’t get further promoted by whatever little amount by search engines and whatnot.

Already, there is questionable content on this account which does not fit with James’ character, as you’ll see below. He’s been quoted as saying “I love Google” – after he was fired! – and all of a sudden he would do something like this? I doubt it…

So, first, what is one of the reasons I think this account is fake? Take a look at this screenshot: (click to enlarge)

The account looks like this:

Again, I’m not linking to any tweets.

That said, all I had to do to find the first tweet was to search on Twitter for: James Damore fake account

Like this:

UPDATE 2017-08-09, 18:19 UTC: I just thought it was worth mentioning that the raw document (the one which includes sources) can – at least for now – be found by simply searching for “google memo” on Google News, as shown at the bottom of this post. Hopefully this means that significantly more people will get a more nuanced picture of things.

But that’s clearly not strong enough, perhaps this author has something to learn from Wall Street Journal? In a piece titled “Memo to a Google Engineer”, the subtitle reads:

“Hey, shut up. Google is fighting the diversity furies and you’re not helping.”

This opinion piece, as it turns out, seems to actually be defending James Damore (subscription required, so I don’t have access to the full piece), but they could work on their wording as well…

Clearly, a vast amount of this supposed “reporting” is not very useful, so, please, RTFM (politely translated as Read The Fine Memo), check out the source material, and make an informed opinion of your own.

Partial Google News screenshot from August 9 – the second link goes directly to the raw PDF:

A Google employee wrote an internal document (not so internal now…) criticizing how the company treats their employees and people who apply for a job there.

This person has since been reported as being fired, though Google won’t confirm this, saying they “can’t comment on individual employee cases”. So while the timing is not in favor of Google in my view, it’s possible he was fired for some unrelated reason. I’m not speculating too much on this either way.

That aside, let’s focus on the memo linked to above, and it’s quite a read.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai responds in a memo of his own:

First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.

He does not go on to say what “portions” or “harmful gender stereotypes” he is referring to.

I find the way that Google and the media is treating this employee is lacking, to say the least. I’ve seen this being caricatured, strawmanned (is that a word?) and worse. By all means, go ahead and criticize the memo if you will, but get the facts straight, and if you’re going to make claims about the document, have the decency to actually present it in the first place!

Gizmodo at least reproduces the memo, “in full” they say, and then go on to say in passing that “two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted”.

Yes, I suppose 32 links to sources are technically several. (That’s without counting the half dozen internal links on top of that.)

SHA-256 checksum of the PDF:
ef5f91368d61e7076e61ef7493e88f2ae45cf5f7cb7b03d66c167fd2346bbc7b

Like this:

Thanks to excerpts from Secular Talk, I learned of an Intercept interview where Ralph Nader addresses the decline of the Democratic Party in the USA, sharing his deep insight in great detail. While the poor performance of the Dems is most obvious in recent years, he traces its roots to the 1970s.

As illustrated in the interview, the fundamental flaws of US politics today are difficult to root out. There are many lessons to be learned here, in the US and elsewhere.

One quote of many: (deliberately out of context – read through the article!)

[A] soft tone, smiling … You can say terrible things and do terrible things as long as you have [that] type of presentation.

Share this:

Like this:

Update 19:33: funny story on Al Jazeera English just now. Following the resignation of Mubarak, an overjoyed taxi driver reportedly left his vehicle, leaving a camera man from the network to drive it. 😎

Just one day after he signaled he would not do so, Mubarak has resigned, according to USA Today and others. Excerpt from the article: (note: some (unimportant) errors here, not introduced by me)

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has resigne.d Vice President Omar Suleiman said in a brief televised statement. His statement in full: “Hosni Mubarak has waived the office of presidency and told the army to run the affairs of the country. ”

Tahrir Square is full of joy and possibly noisier than ever.

It remains to be seen what really happened behind the scenes and how things will progress in terms of elections etc.